Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Tone melodies in the age of surface correspondence

Sharon Inkelas
Stephanie Shih
2016

In this paper, we reexamine tone melody inventories in Mende, a landmark case study in the development of Autosegmental Phonology. We argue for adopting an approach couched within Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) Theory, in which tone melody inventories emerge naturally from the phonological grammar, rooted in independently-motivated principles of similarity and proximity with proven effects in segmental phenomena. The ABC-driven approach allows more fine-grained predictions in OT for the behavior of tone, and unites the analysis of tone and segmental patterns without the need for the...

Lexical competition in vowel articulation revisited: Vowel dispersion in the Easy/Hard database.

Susanne Gahl
2015

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. In J. Local, R. Ogden & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology, Vol. VI (pp. 26–50)) reported that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker's F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represented difficult recognition targets (‘...

Many neighborhoods: Phonological and perceptual neighborhood density in lexical production and perception

Susanne Gahl
Julia Strand
2016

We examine the relationship of lexical representations, pronunciation variation, and word recognition, by investigating effects of two lexical variables: Phonological Neighborhood Density (the number of words that can be formed by a single phoneme substitution, addition, or deletion from the target word), as well as a measure of the perceptual similarity of a target word to other words in the lexicon. We show that perceptual similarity to other words affects recognition, but not production. Phonological Neighborhood Density, on the other hand, affects both word durations and...

Perceptual integration of acoustic cues to laryngeal contrasts in Korean fricatives

Sarah Lee
Jonah Katz
2016

This paper provides evidence that multiple acoustic cues involving the presence of low-frequency energy integrate in the perception of Korean coronal fricatives. This finding helps explain a surprising asymmetry between the production and perception of these fricatives found in previous studies: lower F0 onset in the following vowel leads to a response bias for plain [s] over fortis [s*], despite the fact that there is no evidence for a corresponding acoustic asymmetry in the production of [s] and [s*]. A fixed classification task using the Garner paradigm provides evidence that low...

The auditory representation of speech sounds in human motor cortex

Connie Cheung
Liberty S. Hamilton
Keith Johnson
Edward F. Chang
2016

In humans, listening to speech evokes neural responses in the motor cortex. This has been controversially interpreted as evidence that speech sounds are processed as articulatory gestures. However, it is unclear what information is actually encoded by such neural activity. We used high-density direct human cortical recordings while participants spoke and listened to speech sounds. Motor cortex neural patterns during listening were substantially different than during articulation of the same sounds. During listening, we observed neural activity in the superior and inferior regions of...

High-Resolution, Non-Invasive Imaging of Upper Vocal Tract Articulators Compatible with Human Brain Recordings

Kristofer E. Bouchard
David F. Conant
Gopala K. Anumanchipalli
Benjamin Dichter
Kris S. Chaisanguanthum
Keith Johnson
Edward F. Chang
2016

A complete neurobiological understanding of speech motor control requires determination of the relationship between simultaneously recorded neural activity and the kinematics of the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. Many speech articulators are internal to the vocal tract, and therefore simultaneously tracking the kinematics of all articulators is nontrivial — especially in the context of human electrophysiology recordings. Here, we describe a noninvasive, multi-modal imaging system to monitor vocal tract kinematics, demonstrate this system in six speakers during production of nine American...